兩漢傭價變遷考證

Abstract

In regard to employment practices during the Han dynasties, yongjia 傭價 (compensation paid to employed laborers in the form of money or provisions such as grains or cloth) has been an important object of study. An accurate definition of yongjia is valuable for an understanding of the historical fluctuations in the class of employed laborers and social conditions from the middle period of the Former Han onward. For this reason most previous studies concerned with employment practices during the Han dynasties have dealt with yongjia to one extent or another. Nevertheless, the sources are inadequate, disbursed, and often contradictory. This is a fundamental difficulty of research into employment practices, and there has yet to be a scholarly consensus on the amounts of yongjia. This article relies on written sources and excavated materials in an attempt to explain yongjia in hopes of building a foundation for research into the relationship between employed laborers and employment practices. In other words, by indicating the general standard of the yongjia for fixed periods of time, I will confirm the changes over time in the yongjia in accord with social development, and grasp the degree of societal demand for employed laborers. In this article, I make a principle of this examination to build a foundation of this study based on a systematic critique and reorganization of traditional written sources and to conduct a dynamic consideration of yongjia. In doing this, I distinguish public and private employment relations and classify the work of employed laborers roughly on the basis of the content of the work into light and hard labor. I was thereby able to draw the following conclusions. First, for employment in the private sphere during the Han dynasty, it was common practice to provide meals during work hours in addition to monetary compensation. Second, monetary compensation for employed laborers generally tended to increase during the Han dynasty, and particularly after the period of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Former Han. In addition, judging from the increase in the population of consumers who could support individual employed laborers, the speed of the rise must have been faster than the general rise in commodity prices. Third, from the period of the Former Han to the end of the Later Han, the shift in labor from "slaves" to "itinerant labor" in private enterprises (with the exception of farms) was a cause of the rise of the yongjia.